But too late. News that Germanicus was playing to the gallery in Alexandria could hardly help but reach Tiberius – and it did not go down well. However sensitive a posting Syria might be, Egypt was even more so. Such was its wealth, after all, that it had effectively bankrolled Antony’s bid for world domination – a detail that no Caesar was ever likely to forget. Augustus, for all his boast that he had ‘added Egypt to the empire of the Roman people’,47 had kept such a vice-like grip upon the new province that it had ranked, in practice, as his own personal fiefdom – a display of neurosis that Tiberius had naturally made sure to emulate. No members of the Roman elite were permitted to enter Egypt without his express permission; only equestrians were ever appointed to govern it; even a hint of uppitiness, and a governor would ruthlessly be removed from office. Indeed, it was the measure of Tiberius’s anxiety to secure the province that within months of succeeding Augustus he had appointed as his legate in Alexandria none other than Seius Strabo, erstwhile prefect of the Praetorians, and father of his most trusted partisan. Meanwhile, beyond the purlieus of the great harbour-city, along the banks of the Nile, where ancient, animal-headed gods were still worshipped by Egyptians who might not speak a word of Greek, nor ever have seen a Roman, the distant Princeps was being honoured in primordial fashion. Just as once, back in the fabulous mists of time, Egyptian scribes had chiselled into temple walls the names of their own native kings, carefully set within regular ovals, so now, whenever fresh ovals came to be engraved, they would contain within them the name of Tiberius. In Egypt it was less as the first citizen of the Roman people that he ruled than as a pharaoh.
Nothing, then, could have done more to set the Princeps twitching than to have the grandson of Antony and the granddaughter of Augustus hailed as gods in Alexandria. When Germanicus returned to the city from a Nile cruise, it was to find a furious missive waiting for him from Rome. Had the terms of Tiberius’s criticisms not chimed so readily with those of Piso, then the contretemps would doubtless soon have been forgotten – for Germanicus, after all, had never intended to step on his uncle’s toes. As it was, he returned to Syria to find its governor newly emboldened. The campaign of insubordination waged by Piso had hit fresh heights of insolence during his absence – and Germanicus, when he discovered that his every last order had been countermanded, decided that enough was enough. Silver-haired Piso may have been, of an ancient family, and seasoned in the service of the Republic – but Germanicus tore a strip off him nevertheless.
The governor, his dignity fatally injured, resolved to depart Antioch. Before he could leave, though, news came that his adversary had fallen ill. Piso’s spirits duly soared – only to be dashed by an update, which reported a recovery, and that the whole of Antioch was offering up sacrifices in relief. Piso, whose judgement was by now fatally clouded by the sheer intensity of his loathing for Germanicus, sponsored his lictors to break up the celebrations, and then retreated down the Orontes to await further developments. These, as it turned out, were already spiralling out of control. Antioch was rife with talk of poison and sorcery. Not only, it seemed, had Germanicus suffered a relapse, but his servants, pulling apart his bedroom, had discovered marks of witchcraft secreted in the walls and under the floorboards: bones, dried blood, smears of ash. Germanicus himself, as he lay dying, had specifically fingered Piso as the man responsible.
So it was, for the second time, that the journey of a young Caesar to the East ended in calamity. Yet though the loss of Gaius had certainly been a grievous blow to Augustus, and though Livia’s hand in it would subsequently be darkly suspected, it had not set off such reverberations as the death of Germanicus now threatened. His last words, delivered with his customary heightened emotion from the capital of Roman Asia, could hardly have been less helpful to Tiberius. First, he had openly accused the Princeps’s legate and friend of plotting his murder. Then, even while urging Agrippina to rein in her instinctive tendency to grandstand, he had simultaneously instructed everyone else gathered around his deathbed to take full advantage of it. ‘Display before the Roman people the granddaughter of the deified Augustus, and recite to them the names of my children!’48
Such an appeal embodied everything that the Princeps had always most mistrusted in his nephew; yet even as Germanicus was delivering it, the man sent to Asia to serve as a check upon his instincts, and to embody the stern and flinty instincts of Tiberius himself, was only stoking the flames. Piso remained too blinded by the insult done his honour to let it lie. At the news of his rival’s death he flung open temples in his joy, raising sacrifices to the gods and lavishing fresh donatives on his men. Then, when the senators in Germanicus’s train appointed one of their own number, a former consul by the name of Sentius, to serve as governor in his place, Piso resorted to force in defence of what remained, after all, legally his office. Citizen faced citizen: ‘Pisonian’ took up arms against ‘Caesarian’.49 Fifty years after the battle of Actium, it seemed that the evils of civil war, ‘long since laid to rest by the divine will of the deified Augustus, and by the virtues of Tiberius Caesar Augustus’,50 were returning to plague the world.
The human face of the crisis, as the dying Germanicus had known it would be, was provided by Agrippina. Rather than wait for spring, she embarked for home the moment that the ashes of her husband’s pyre had cooled. Pausing only to swap insults with Piso after an inadvertent brush with his flotilla, she set sail across the wintry seas for home. When she finally docked at Brundisium, it was as though the whole of Italy had massed to greet her. As the pale-faced widow appeared on the gangplank, the urn containing her husband’s ashes in her hands, and Caligula and little Julia Livilla by her side, the sobs and wails of the crowd blended into a single animal howl of pain. Ever since the definitive confirmation of Germanicus’s death, Rome had been sodden with grief. ‘Not an honour that love or wit could devise but it had been bestowed upon him.’51 Now, in the slow and stately journey of his ashes towards the city, there was the flavour of one final tribute: not merely a funerary procession but a triumph. Praetorians provided the fallen hero with his escort; lictors reversed their fasces and standards were stripped of their adornments; incense burned by mourning bystanders wreathed with its bitter perfumes the entire length of the Appian Way. Forty miles south of the capital, the ashes were met by Germanicus’s brother, the shambling and decidedly unheroic figure of Claudius, by his adoptive brother, Drusus, and by the four children that he and Agrippina had left behind them in Italy. Then, on reaching Rome, the procession was joined by the two consuls and an array of senators. Through packed streets muffled save for the wailing of mourners it continued along its way. Only out on the Campus did it finally come to a halt. Illumined by the blaze of a multitude of torches, and watched by the black-mantled silhouette of Agrippina, Germanicus’s mortal remains were reverently consigned to their final resting place: the great Mausoleum of Augustus.
Meanwhile, of his uncle, the First Citizen of the Republic, there was not a sign. As ever, Tiberius regarded the parading of grief as beneath his dignity. Neither he, nor Livia, nor Germanicus’s mother were glimpsed in public. Who were any of them, as they mourned their loss, to be dictated to by the lachrymose self-indulgence of a mob? The mood of the city, though, was turning ugly. The absence of the Princeps from the very public displays of mourning was read as an insult. Worse – as a confession of guilt. Germanicus’s dying charge, that Piso had poisoned him, was on everybody’s lips. Such an accusation was not easily rebutted. For Tiberius to have pointed out, as he might well have done, that the climate of the Levant was notoriously unhealthy, that many there had succumbed to disease, that the supposed marks of witchcraft found under Germanicus’s floorboards might just as plausibly have been animal remains, would have been insufferably demeaning; and yet his silence hung heavy in the air. The Roman people, in their grief and their anger, did not find it hard to adduce a motive. Gazing on their hero’s widow, they hailed her as the last grandchild of Augustus left standing. Raising their hands to the heavens, they prayed that her children ‘would outlive their foes’.52